logoalt Hacker News

GeoJSON

48 pointsby toshtoday at 9:55 AM26 commentsview on HN

Comments

phillc73today at 1:56 PM

GeoJSON is not just for geographical features! Shapes of any kind work just as well.

QuPath[1], a tool for digital pathology whole slide image analysis, can export annotations in GeoJSON format (and import too I suppose).[2] This makes it really very easy to make annotations transportable between tooling.

[1] https://qupath.github.io/

[2] https://github.com/qupath/qupath-docs/blob/main/docs/advance...

DarkNova6today at 1:16 PM

I’ve had nothing but problems using GeoJson. The specification has limitations everywhere and doesn’t even support z + m values at the same time.

But thankfully there is also the SQLite backed GeoPackage, which is not only more flexible but also much smaller. It takes some extra steps to get testing teams working due to it’s binary nature, but other than that it is the best format in geospatial data analysis.

Long live SQLite!

nobleachtoday at 1:23 PM

We used this extensively when I worked in this space (2010 - 2014). My favorite addition was using https://github.com/topojson/topojson to add arcs. That cut down on quite a bit of points to represent curves.

show 1 reply
Waterluviantoday at 12:29 PM

I’ve applied GeoJSON (among many other GIS tech) for mapping and monitoring tens of thousands of warehouse robots. It works great as long as you squint just a bit, ignoring that it generally calls for long,lat and is designed with the assumption of a world CRS.

The dangerous part is that some tools fully assume this and will completely screw with calculations if you’re assuming a flatland CRS. So you’ve got to be careful in checking and setting those parameters.

One nice thing is that the structure of GeoJSON works incredibly well in typescript. It has discriminated unions built in so you can walk entire geodatasets in a pretty comfortable way.

show 2 replies
jackconsidinetoday at 12:11 PM

GeoJSON is super useful. At Getcho (delivery, logistics) we use zip code GeoJSON encodings to draw polygons on zone maps and quickly generate rates. This has been a persistently annoying thing to do until we discovered this format. If you're curious, someone made a repo with all the 2010 census zips a while back [0].

[0] https://github.com/OpenDataDE/State-zip-code-GeoJSON/blob/ma... although you can generate newer versions from the last census.

show 1 reply
biosboiiitoday at 1:40 PM

I love GeoJSON :) You can bring any Geo/GIS from 0 to visualization by just parsing it into GeoJSON.

geojson.io is a great editor/viewer by Mapbox. Also https://kepler.gl/demo is great for additional filtering, visualizations like heatmaps, arcs etc.

A extension to GeoJSON that works with JSONL-like semantics would be great for huge files, but this could also be solved by tiling.

rageboltoday at 12:53 PM

Have been using GeoJSON, very handy and human-readable, but we recently switched to GeoPackage files, as it allows for different layers, each with a different schema for additional data.

GeoPackages also allow to set a proper CRS, which is not as easy in GeoJSON IIRC.

Getting your CRSes wrong is fun...

michaeljhgtoday at 12:22 PM

Also https://postgis.net/

show 2 replies
dnnddidiejtoday at 1:42 PM

Looks like what any sensible dev would come up with if asked to "return this geo data as json". I like simple!

sam_lowry_today at 11:54 AM

Dunno whose website this is, but the format itself is great, and it allows for a relatively compact and relatively human-readable presentation.

A few weeks ago I (vibe)coded mxmap.be and if not for the ubiquity of geojson, it would have taken me significantly more effort.

show 2 replies
CamouflagedKiwitoday at 12:33 PM

This is nice. I haven't worked with GIS data for ages but I really like the idea of a well-understood plain text container for it. Much nicer than wrangling with binary formats like shapefiles, especially when something goes wrong and you're not sure if it's your code (well more precisely your usage of whatever library you've got for it) or the data.

trgntoday at 1:29 PM

nice and simple, great. but because it's json, most parsers are horribly inefficient, which is tough, because a lot of geodata is massive.

mtucker502today at 12:32 PM

The properties key is plural but contains a dictionary. Does the schema allow for this to be a list?

show 1 reply
toshtoday at 12:15 PM

vega-lite supports rendering of GeoJSON via 'geoshape'

https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/docs/geoshape.html

vortegnetoday at 12:48 PM

Recently I got into cartography software for a bit and the horrors of the data formats in this industry are real. Feels like everyone under the sun has their own.

All that said, GeoJSON was a great change of pace, I enjoyed using it. While I'm no professional and have no idea what the professional needs are, it was very good for my hobbyist needs.

volume_techtoday at 1:05 PM

[dead]